UIQ - A Space Oddity

Following the pub­li­ca­tion in 1980 of Mille Plateaux, a work that for many marked the cul­mi­na­tion of Félix Guattari’s intel­lec­tual adven­ture with Gilles Deleuze, Guattari began work on a film script for a science fic­tion movie, Un amour d’UIQ. Initially devel­oped in col­lab­o­ra­tion with film­maker Robert Kramer, the script ofUIQ (Universe Infra-Quark) was to occupy Guattari on and off for the next seven years.

Influenced both by his work with psy­chotics at the La Borde clinic and his engage­ment with rad­ical pol­i­tics, UIQ offers a blueprint for a sub­ver­sive ’pop­ular’ cinema (Guattari orig­i­nally had ambi­tions to make the film in Hollywood with Spielberg’s then pro­ducer Michael Phillips) of scram­bled semi­otic codes, imper­sonal, transper­sonal affects and minori­tarian becom­ings that in terms of the pos­si­bility of its actu­ally being pro­duced would be pure science fic­tion. Yet in desiring to make the film in the com­mer­cial arena as a sci-fi block­buster, Guattari was effec­tively raising the stakes of his own polit­ical engage­ment, attempting to break into the dream fac­tory to recon­figure pat­terns of col­lec­tive uncon­scious desire.

In this audio­vi­sual essay, the first stage in a mul­ti­form pro­ject around UIQ (which will also include a book pub­li­ca­tion of the script in col­lab­o­ra­tion with psy­cho­an­a­lyst Isabelle Mangou), artists and film­makers Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson con­sider how the devel­op­ment of the UIQ script appears amid a gen­eral resur­gence of interest in science fic­tion in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is around this time that sci-fi becomes a screen of pro­jec­tion and mourning for the scat­tered phan­toms of dis­ap­pointed rev­o­lu­tionary desire, in which the rad­ical alterity of a polit­ical ’out­side’ is increas­ingly pro­jected no longer through the imag­i­nary of col­lec­tive struggle but in terms of encoun­ters with alien intel­li­gences or life forces – encoun­ters con­fig­ured within a con­tinuum that runs from inter­face to inter­body to inter­brain.

UIQ imag­ines a hyper intel­li­gent infra-cel­lular life sub­stance as capable of trans­mit­ting its nascent will through global com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works as of plug­ging into the pre­car­ious ‘desiring machines’ of a com­mu­nity of social and psy­cho­log­ical out­siders. The film could con­sid­ered a ’molec­ular’ inter­brane response to an imag­i­nary and ide­o­log­ical clo­sure that began to take hold during the1980s, medi­ated through the aes­thetics of post­modern nos­talgia. Guattari’s unre­alised film has inter­esting impli­ca­tions both for cinema and col­lec­tive prac­tices in terms of how it promises to rewire dom­i­nant modes of spec­ta­tor­ship and sub­jec­ti­va­tion.

By placing echoes of the unfilmed script in rela­tion to a mon­tage of scenes from sci-fi films of the period – from Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker, to Spielberg’s Close Encounters and ET through Demon Seed, The State of Things, Blade Runner, Videodrome, Starman and others – Maglioni & Thomson aim to iso­late the sin­gu­larity of UIQ in the vir­tual dimen­sion of what it might have been and what it may yet become.

Through the UIQ script we can see, in a move­ment a-par­allel to Deleuze’s mon­u­mental philo­soph­ical study on the cinema, Image mou­ve­ment/ image temps, the emer­gence of Guattari’s own theory and con­tin­gent prag­matics of ‘minor’ cinema. Although, or per­haps because, the film was never made, ele­ments of UIQ will resur­face in some of the con­cepts devel­oped in his last major the­o­ret­ical work, Chaosmosis, part of the move­ment of an out­landish thought that zigzags between theory and fab­u­la­tion, science and fic­tion.

The lec­ture per­for­mance will be fol­lowed by a con­ver­sa­tion with Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Group, Isabelle Mangou and Dork Zabunyan